Weave.org is Mine!

byweaveonJanuary 2, 2010

Weave has been my nickname ever since some guy named Frank Kros set me up a user account in 1982 on a Burroughs mainframe that I was to do some contract COBOL programming on. The college I was attending at rented time on that system. Since he forgot how to spell my last name, he just gave me a user account named “weave” on it — and I’ve been using that name ever since.

In 1999, right smack in the middle of the dot com boom period, domain names were selling like mad, with some fetching millions of dollars. It got tough to find short domain names for reasonable prices. I did manage to get weaverling.org and weaverling.com then because I have a fairly unusual last name. But anything weave.* was just not going to happen.

The domain weave.org expired a few months ago due to non-payment by original owner. Once that happens, as with other domains, there’s a grace period where the original owner can reclaim it. After that, it’s released and various scum bag companies that collude with registrars and hence have hooks into the entire domain process can snap it up and offer it for resale to the highest bidder.

That is what happened to weave.org. 38 people besides myself put in an initial offer for the domain. One guy topped me, with username of rogabiz. I googled that and found out that user is most likely a domain speculator, attempting to buy low and resell high. I also saw that weave.info is for sale at $1,697 at another site.

So I figured I was doomed. weave.org would have to have more value than the name in the lesser known TLD of .info. But I decided to give it a try and was worried I’d get too carried away and pay too much. I was hoping to not go higher than $500 but might have went a bit over that if needed.

But I had a bit of potential good luck on my side. The domain auction was listed to end on December 31st at 15:55. Hoping that most serious speculators would not be “working” on New Years Eve. I set out to try sniping in a bid at the last minute. But timing was the key. Any bids submitted during the last five minutes increased the bid deadline by another five minutes. So I dropped my bid in with six minutes to go, at 15:49. I then sat there for 6 minutes anxiously waiting to see if anyone submitted a higher bid.

Until eventually, bam — it was MINE MINE MINE! So now you can email me @weave.org too!